Assembling Your Computer’s Brain, Byte by Byte

Computers are amazing machines. They can perform massive amounts of stuff every second, and they’re being put into everything around us to make the things we interact with on a day-to-day basis smarter and better. This is made all the more remarkable by the fact that computers are astonishingly dumb. My favorite explanation of just how […]

Configuring Per-Locale Font Selection with FontConfig

As I gain experience programming, I find myself becoming more and more mindful about implicit assumptions I might be making while solving problems. Spending hours debugging timezone issues or unexpectedly time-sensitive date calculations has revealed that everything I thought I knew about time (and many other subjects) is wrong. Such experiences have led me to take […]

You’ve Gotta Pick Up the Ducky

When you run into tough spots, it’s nice to have another person look at the problem. Rather than immediately visiting a coworker, though, I first turn to another expert:

Focus-Handling Methods for Qt Quick StackViews

On my current project, we’re building the GUI in Qt 5. It’s (mostly) open-source, has some really intriguing platform support, and Qt Quick 2 has a fairly advanced model for both keyboard focus and transitioning focus between widgets just with the keyboard. When I started work on a spike to prove out some ideas I […]

Rapid Prototypes for Devices with Raspberry Pi

Since joining Atomic, I’ve worked on quite a few web projects, where rapid prototypes are common and quite easy to produce. Unfortunately, not all domains we deal in have such luxuries. My latest project is a lightweight embedded linux device with a GUI and physical buttons. In such a stack, it can be hard to […]

Why I Still Like Ember.js

I’ve been using Ember.js on and off on a variety of projects for nearly two years now. Ember has proven to be quite unique. Even after getting very, very familiar with it, I still quite like it. As with all things I’ve found in programming, it has caused me pain at times, but far less […]

A Replacement for Ember’s Deprecated Ember.Set

Having a Set datatype can be really handy in many situations. From Ember.js 0.9 all the way up to 1.8, Ember.js supplied a Set type with an interface loosely based on an early ES6 proposal. Unfortunately, since the ES6 API had drifted and the maintainers of Ember deemed it more suitable for an external library […]

Python Environment Management for Rubyists – a Guide

Python has always been an intriguing language to me, but I’ve never been a huge fan of its syntax. I have always liked Lisps, though. Thus, when I discovered Hy a few months ago, I was completely smitten. Then I tried to set up a development environment, and was caught in a morass of old […]

Using Ember CLI with PhoneGap’s CLI Tools

For a recent project, a client wanted a mobile phone application that would work across both iOS and Android. As someone with more experience with web development than either iOS or Android, turning to Adobe’s PhoneGap seemed a fairly obvious path. I would be able to leverage more of my existing skill set, and could […]

Relaxing and Rediscovering Childhood Joy

As a small child, I loved nothing better than reading. I read everything I could get my hands on, as fast as I could. I wasn’t allowed flashlights in my room, as my parents knew I’d just use them to read under the covers. At one point, they even took my alarm clock, since I […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Mitchell Johnson

Author: Mitchell Johnson